by popular demand I can't believe how many people have asked me to unbox this
the ASUS Rampage 3 Black Edition
motherboard so this is part of their Republic of Gamers brand this is an x58
that is an LGA 1366 motherboard it supports cor i7 extremes core i7s NVIDIA
SLI and ATI Crossfire I think they mean AMD Crossfire but the badge has yet to
be updated uh let's go around to the back where we will find a couple of
things first there is an Rog Thunderbolt
so that appears to be I don't know something looks like a sound card so
we'll get a little bit into that looks like it has external power so that's got to have a headphone amp on it we've got
Bluetooth v3.0 okay we've got Rog connect which is
their um uh their overclocking feature
which allows you to use another computer to plug into here and then alter
overclocking settings as well as Extreme Engine Digi plus which is their vrm
solution all right everything else on here on the back is pretty straightforward so why don't we go ahead
and have a look at what is presumably a window into the future of
motherboards there's the Thunderbolt look at that powered by oxnar I mean
Zonar sorry sorry um so we'll we'll look at that more later but let's have a look
at what's in here so first of all we have a built-in headphone amp aha sound
greater yeah it will sound greater with a headphone amp guarantee uh what what
else do we have here okay so that looks like some sort of processing chip okay
that's good we have a dedicated npu so that's a killer
e2100 dedicate really is that a full
e2100 wow cool okay so there you go you
got a PCI e1x uh killer killer Nick all
right Extreme Engine Digi plus okay analog and digital design elements
combined for power okay Rog connect
we've already covered that Bluetooth v3.0 sers and Wi-Fi enjoyment new
technology lifestyle excellent kasperski antivirus
and that's pretty much it so let's start opening this thing up I'm actually
excited about this because I did not even know that this product existed
until I had like 300 billion requests to
unbox it uh all over my Channel all over
my inbox I even had some guy email me
and it's like okay don't know how you got my email but like thank you for
requesting an unboxing in it I'll see what I can do okay here we are
lots of accessories look at this so we have a couple of Wi-Fi antennas I
remember these I had one of these with my a832 SLI Deluxe I think that's around
the time they started shipping these uh these Wi-Fi antennas with onboard Wi-Fi
on their motherboards and they stopped doing it for a while all right we've got
a USB uh USB 2.0 and ESAT PCI bracket got
a little chipset fan which Probably sounds horrible don't recommend using
that in all like likelihood okay we've got an extension cable for
USB okay oh or or onboard uh or front
panel audio maybe I don't know I don't know what this is for okay next we've
got uh some SATA 3 cables which are exactly the same as the six SATA 2 CA so
that's uh two SATA 3 6 SATA 2 cables except for the color okay we've got the
Rog connect USB cable so why don't me
throw all these back in here there we are we've got a two-way SLI
Bridge we have a two-way SLI Bridge we
have a crossfire Bridge okay we have their Q connector which is uh for the
front panel connectors as well as one USB 2.0 header make it a little easier
to plug in we've got some zip ties we have an IO Shield some temperature
probes a user guide Rampage 3 black
that's a heavy user guy that's like thick look at that okay and then we have
a uh an Intel chipset and support DVD as well as a republic of
Gamers sticker throw away the DVD there oo look
at this audio Precision test report
Thunderbolt powered by Zonar so what's this disclaimer the
information and contents contained in the something something okay so
basically they're just showing it's really good cool thanks guys okay then
we got a big old case sticker and let's go ahead and uh
put that back too all right motherboard
time okay Thunderbolt why don't we do
the Thunderbolt a little bit later actually give me two seconds here guys
all right so we're going to have a look at the Thunderbolt powered by Zonar
first so this is a PCI e1x combo card it includes not
only the Lan Port but also the Zonar
aspects which are the sound aspects of the very high-end Lan and sound solution
that comes with this board so you've got a SPI if out you've also got a line out
and a line in okay moving around we've got a matte
black PCB and you can see right on the back here you've got Rampage 3 Black
Edition as well as your serial number information all on there okay we've also
got front audio out which is right here
and at the back of the card we've got a USB connection which is evidently what
that little USB extension cable was for and then we've also got a Molex power
connector so that is going to provide power to the
Amplified audio
outport all right let's have a look at the motherboard itself so the first
thing I noticed about it three guesses guys matte black PCB love it anything
with a matte black PCB could be in my system no problem because matte black
pcbs look awesome next thing I noticed about this board is it has a
non-standard layout it is slightly wider than an ATX spec an ATX board would
normally end right about here okay this one is just a little bit wide so you
don't need additional mounting holes you don't need an eatx case but you will
need um a a little bit more width on the
edge of your motherboard tray in order to install this board so you can see it's only 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 in L in in
length or in height so it's a standard ATX height but it's a little bit bit
wide all right so let's start at the CPU socket right in the middle cuz that's a
good place to start as I mentioned before that is an LGA 1366 socket so
that has full support for all the core i7 extremes core i7s on the LGA
1366 platform here we've got the pwm
which includes a very very slick looking cooler
okay so here you go there's some kind of
NEC SL token talken token however you
pronounce that chip here as well as eight phases of their Digi plus
pwm actually hold on bear with me a moment yes 8 plus three phase power so
what that means is we've got eight higher quality phases as opposed to uh
putting a ton of lower quality phases on this particular motherboard that is the
route ASUS has decided to go moving over here we've got support for
triple Channel memory up to six dims so it uses ASUS's um easy slots so that
means you only have to actually fasten the clip on the one side you just slide
it in the one side put it in and then you push the clip in like this we've got
a post LED indicator so that'll give you post codes right there we have start and
reset switches on board we've also got voltage checkpoints all down here so
we've got a couple grounds uh we've got
CPU CPU PLL qpi ioh ioh PCIe I I PCIe and RAM so
that's actually More Voltage checkpoints than I've seen on I think any other
board here are the PCI e6x switches so
you can actually use these to easily diagnose video cards this is this
feature there have been times when I would have pretty much done anything for
this feature because when you install don't turn the camera sideways
like that when you install a couple of video cards and they're you know they
got full cover liquid cooling blocks on them and you're trying to figure out
okay you have a video problem is the is the bottom C dead the easiest way to
find out would be to go like this turn off your top slot boom all of a sudden
that's your primary PCI E slot now you can find out if that card's dead or if
it's something else that's wrong with your system so it's great for uh for
troubleshooting they've also got um this button which is for making sure that the
system will post 100% no problem uh with
the any memory no matter what the spec is 24 pin power here we've got also a
USB 3.0 front panel header so you can use that on any new
case that supports a USB 3.0 uh USB 3.0 front ports via a header
we've also got storage here so we've got six SATA 2 3 GB per second as well as
two SATA 3 6 gbit per second ports we've
got a pretty sweet looking Southbridge heat sink which has a Seuss branding on
it it's got kind of a matte black finish the entire board almost is black other
than a couple little red accents which look really good dual BIOS right here
you can see we've got two dedicated BIOS chips couple front USB ports oh yeah
front panel switches as well as a BIOS clear switch right here there's a ton of
four pin pwm fan connectors I'll count them in a minute but there's just seems
to be a ton on this board we've got a Molex uh easy plug here so that's if
you're loading this up with graphics cards you might need to provide some auxiliary power to prevent your 24 pin
connector from burning out from providing all that juice all through the
board okay we've got a front audio connector on the motherboard itself as
well using x52 Supreme FX so if you
don't want to use the Thunderbolt card you still have pretty decent onboard
audio which is kind of cool okay so that's your that's that you
also have pretty decent onboard Ethernet so they're using the Intel Ethernet as
opposed to a third party chip for the onboard Ethernet as well if you don't
want to use the killer e2100 that comes on the Thunderbolt card so let's have a
look at what we've got oh yeah I promised to count the four pin pwm fan
connectors oh one more other thing that I haven't shown yet to is it has two
PCIe 8 Pin connectors or PCIe two CPU
EPS 8 Pin connectors up here so you're going to need to access those from the
top probably one of them is optional uh but providing both will give you
potential more current to the CPU socket we got 1 2 3 4 H just zoom out so you
can see where these are four uh five 6 7
eight eight four pin pwm fan connectors
all over this motherboard craziness oh yeah here's where that fan goes on the
North Bridge heat sink so that's where I mentioned there was a red accent there
so you can bolt that fan on there and get a little bit of additional cooling
if you are using water cooling or some other kind of uh cooling that doesn't
provide any incid Dental air flow to the Northbridge heat sink all right so let's
have a look at the back where we will find our Bluetooth 3.0 as well as
Wireless Len 80211 BGN there's also
another reset switch up here that's a very peculiar place for it all right and
an additional one here you be kidding me oh yeah okay
there's a clear seimos switch there okay we've got one of those PS2 mouse
keyboard combo ports we have 1 2 3 4 5
six USB 2.0 ports here on the back we have two USB 3.0 ports two EA ports we
have our rogg connect button as well as the USB port for that the Intel land
that I mentioned before as well as the creative x52 Supreme FX sound that I
mentioned before so this is a Decked Out
motherboard there is no doubt about it we've also got some additional heat
Sinker going on on the back here for the pwm as well as the standard LGA 1366
back plate all of the heat sinks on the front are attached via screws which is
nice because they can't come out like push pins also means if you need to take
them off and put them back on you don't risk damaging the push pins making it
impossible thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Rampage 3 Black Edition
from theeus don't forget to subscribe to Lion's techtips for more unboxings
reviews and other computer videos so I did have to RTM for a couple of these
things uh first of all there is an ln2 mode jumper over here and that along
with the Q reset button over here which actually stops power to the CPU to allow
you to recover from a non-posting state
when you are using liquid nitrogen is uh some of the extreme overclocking
features that we have on this here particular board there's also a jumper
for a load line calibration on the qpi
okay we also have uh whoops we also clarified what this guy down here does
this is a bio switch so you can actually switch uh between these two BIOS chips here on
the board and I think that's pretty much all that we wanted to cover here